All Skins and Taunts are now available for players to preview in the Dojo

Training & New Player Experience

We want to give all new players – especially you who have joined us through the Battleborn Free Trial – a much improved entry in to the Battleborn Versus matches! With so much depth, it takes a few games to get your feet wet and to master the basics you’ll need to succeed against experienced players. To help with that, we’re changing how new players begin their Battleborn experience.

Versus Prologue

All new players must now play through the Versus Prologue before gaining access to the other multiplayer queues. While this training focuses on „Incursion“, it also trains many of the core concepts of Versus Battleborn, including the Helix system, minions, buildables, and which button you push to Return to Base for instant healing! (By the way – it’s „B“ on PC and „D-Pad Down“ on Xbox One and PS4).

Novice Queues & Command Rank Restrictions

With the update, we want new Battleborn players to have the best chance possible at finding matches closer to their skill level. So, we are introducing „Novice“ queues for players below Command Rank 20.

After completing the Versus Prologue, new players will unlock new queues as they gain command ranks.

„Bots Battle“ replaces „Novice Versus“ – Play against Bots matched with players of any command rank.

Command Rank 20

All regular Versus queues.

Novice queues will be unavailable to players above command rank 20, even if they are in groups of players of lower command rank. Players below command rank 20 can join a group with a higher command rank player and be matched into the regular queues; however, novice players cannot match into those queues themselves.

Boosters / Consumables

We made a few quality-of-life changes to Boost UI, adding widgets to the Command Menu AND the front end to let you know which boosts are running and how much longer they will last.

Also, we’ve added a new type of Boost available to Trial players called the „Battle Pass“ booster. The „Battle Pass“ will grant you access to Private Matches, and will temporarily unlock enough characters for Private Matches to allow you to participate in Draft Mode tournaments.

Active Boosters are now displayed in the Command Menu

Added a Battle Pass Booster

NEW FEATURES

Gear Flair

HATS! HORNS! EARS! Oh, my! We’ve added a new visual Gear Flair system to Battleborn! Hunt down visual aesthetic customization enhancements to make your favorite Battleborn look SWANK! Flair has a random chance to be added to any gear item. To wear a piece of Flair, activate that Gear item within any match or mission.

Finishers

Want a way to celebrate each competitive KO with a bang? Finishers let you do just that! Finishers are purchased boosts which will add special FX to a player kill anytime you secure the KO. Pick up a Finisher today and celebrate the sweet taste of victory!

We want to bring more emphasis to our three character archetypes: Attacker, Defender, and Supporter. While we have always tried to maintain versatility with our Battleborn, we will be taking several steps to create more noticeable differences between the broad categories of characters.

Our first change in this direction is to tweak global attack and defense numbers when fighting non-player enemies, such as bots, sentries, thrall, and any enemy in a Story Mission. Attacker characters will get a general damage boost against non-players, and Defenders will take less damage against non-players allowing them to feel more „tanky“.

Attackers deal 15% more damage to non-Battleborn enemies

Defenders take 15% less damage from non-Battleborn enemies

NEW LOOT PACKS

Founder’s Pack

As a „thank you“ to all the players who have joined us for the last year of Battleborn, we dub you „Founders“! We’re giving you several gifts to say thank you in a very tangible way, but the Founder’s Loot pack is one of the coolest parts. As a Founder, the Founder’s Pack will show up in your Command > Gear inventory and opening it will give you the following rewards:

For the serious customization collector, Magnus Packs are now available in the Marketplace for purchase with Platinum! Each Magnus Pack contains the following:

1 Rare or higher gear item, with guaranteed Flair

2 Common or higher gear items, with guaranteed Flair

1 guaranteed Common Skin or Taunt

Chance for a Premium Skin or Taunt

General

Dramatically reduced the amount of critical hits from NPCs, thralls, and minions. Critical Hits are mostly reserved for Players and Bots now, with few exceptions.

Minions are no longer stunned when Blindedor

Any unused Hero Keys will automatically unlock a locked DLC character or, if all DLC characters are unlocked, be exchanged for 47,500 Credits per unused Hero Key.

Performance

Made optimizations to reduce the performance impact of Deande’s Holotwinskill activation

CHARACTERS

General

Along with the Character Role specialization changes, we’ve taken a number of steps to reign in some abilities that provided unintended advantages for particular characters. Chief among these was the amount of Damage Amp available to certain team compositions. While the previous values were appropriate for single target Damage Amp abilities, we concluded that Damage Amp abilities that can easily be applied to multiple targets should be toned down.

Reduced the Damage Amplification of AoE abilities from 16% to 8%

Characters with physical shields can no longer block while turning in Masks in Face-off

Alani

Alani is still performing as an extremely powerful character, very strong in both support an attack roles. We are making a few adjustments to bring her back in line with other Support characters, and to take a bit of the edge from her strength as a ranged attacker. While she can still play the hybrid attacker / healer role, our intent is to remove some of the lane dominance from her current play.

While we have been happy with the results from the previous re-work of Attikus, we feel that his Pounce needed a bit more punch to ground him as a melee initiator. We’re increasing the size of the damage radius caused by Pounce making it easier to land, but adding damage falloff to that radius so that you are still rewarded for skilled placement of the Pounce. Since he is such a big target for up-front brawling, we’re boosting his health a bit. As well, we’re giving players more options for lowering skill cooldowns to increase his effectiveness at initiating with a burst.

Increased Level 10 Mutation Payback Timefrom up to +60 damage to up to +120 damage

Re-named Rank 20 title to „Daddikus„. You’re welcome, r/Battleborn!

Beatrix

Even after some earlier adjustments, Beatrix is still far more lethal than is good for a strong support, especially with access to Silence at low levels. We’re reducing her base attack damage, and the damage of Patient Zero and Plague Rat to help mitigate her effectiveness as a damage dealer. We’re also decreasing her health a small amount to bring her in line with other Support characters.

Most importantly, we’re changing the way Fulminate works. The Silence duration is now split across each of the Fulminate projectiles as a stacking value. While it is still possible to silence a character for 3 seconds, it now requires you to focus a single player to maximize the duration. Previously, the full value applied to each target hit, meaning you could silence an entire group at range for the full duration. You will still be able to use Fulminate as a group interrupt (from the short-duration Silence), but it is no longer possible to apply such a long Silence to an entire group.

Each projectile inFulminate now silences for a portion of the 3 second duration

Reduced Level 5 Left Helix Augment Plague Ratdamage from 25 per second to 20

Boldur

The Level 1 Right Helix Augment Crash Helmet will now only grant an overshield after successfully hitting an enemy with Boldurdash

El Dragón

El Dragón is still lower on both win rate and average kills than we would expect from an attacker. However, in higher-skill play, we still see cases where a well-supported El Dragón can be very effective. We want to create a bit more independence for him, so we’re adding stacking damage reduction to his Passive ability. Now, as El Dragón engages in his principal play loop –defeating enemies and gaining stacks of Undisputed Champion— he will increase in damage dealing and damage reduction. This should give him the edge he needs to survive more of his attack runs as a skirmisher, but requires him to still work for it. As a last note, if you want to maximize survivability, Level 5 Left Helix Augment Heavyweight still grants additional stacking damage bonus IN ADDITION to that gained from Undisputed Champion making him even harder to kill.

Level 5 Left Helix AugmentHeavyweight now rewards an additional 1.5% damage reduction per stack down from 3%

Ernest

Ernest has been gaining a lot of benefit from splash damage on his grenades, requiring less skill than we would prefer to master his potential for damage. We are removing the damage bonus from splash damage of his Direct Hit passive, but increasing the damage dealt to the target. Well-aimed grenades still have the ability to be very effective, but will no longer spread that bonus to every target in a nearby radius.

Changed the functionality of Direct Hitand increased the damage dealt from 15% to 30%:

Oh, Galilea. The legend of the Wraith of Bliss has continued to cast fear in the hearts of opponents. With this round of changes, our intent is to continue to tune Galilea more strongly into her role as territorial defender, still allowing her to be strong, but restricting where she can wield that strength. With these changes, Galilea players will need to focus more on maintaining Corruption, and will need to be more precise with the timing and use of Desecrate to gain her full advantage.

Corruption is getting an overhaul. The radius is shrinking, and we are doubling the amount of stacks Galilea has to gain to achieve the same bonus. It will take Galilea longer to get to the full benefit of Corruption, and she must be more diligent about staying in active combat to maintain those stacks.

We’re also changing the default benefit from Desecration from Damage Amplication to Slow. Galilea will still be strong within her Desecrate AoE, and will have more ability to use melee to hunt down foes. That should require more skill than the benefit from damage amplification which allowed her to close in and swing wildly close in for big spikes of damage.

Lastly of note, we like the fun of It’s Dangerous to Go Alone and the ability for Galilea to finish off ranged targets (especially in Story missions). However, we noticed many Galilea players exploiting this additional attack for more burst damage at close range. So, we’re reducing the amount of damage done by this skill at close range to make it less reliable as an augmentation for melee-range damage output.

Reduced the AoE of Corruption by 20%

Increased Corruption stacks from 20 to 40

Melee attacks gain 1 stack of Corruption

Skills gain 5 stacks of Corruption

DesecrateSlows enemies by default rather than applying Damage Amplification

Skill usage is no longer interrupted when pulled by Level 1 Mutation Vortex

Changed the functionality of Level 8 Right Helix Augment The Black Wind Howls:

Enemies standing in Desecrate take additional damage from all sources. +8% Damage Amplification

Level 8 Mutation Blight Town increases the AoE ofDesecrate by 25% down from 50%

Kid Ultra

Kid Ultra has been a powerful support / damage hybrid, but like several other support characters, we find his damage output too high given his other strengths. We’re applying a small damage reduction to his primary attack, and also dropping down the damage from the Bola Snare on multiple targets to reduce his effectiveness at multi-target damage.

Reduced the base damage of Rocket Gauntlet and Rocket Vortex by 10% (from 54 to 49 per rocket at level 1)

Bola Snareprojectiles now deal 33% less damage after hitting the first target

Reduced the damage over time granted by Level 1 Left Helix Augment Pain Compliancedamage from 213/2s to 107/2s

Mellka

Adjusted the damage fall-off of Custom Machine Pistolto be consistent with that of similar weapons

Montana

While Montana does a great job of filling his role as a Defender capable of tanking and pushing waves, his sustained damage output was a bit higher than we’d like to see from a Defender. Increased Heat generation will entice Montana players to be more conscientious of their Heat level and the ways they interact with it. Additionally, Big Payback was capable of being the highest single instance of damage in the game in extreme situations. By soaking up focused fire or Sentry blasts, Montana could one-shot entire teams with Big Payback, so we’ve put cap on the amount of damage the blast can deal.

Orendi is very close to where we would like most Attackers to be in regards to kills, damage, and wins. With this update, we are taking a small edge off her primary attack.

Pillarstorm is also getting some adjustment. Even though Pillarstorm typically only shows up late game and requires special circumstances for it to be most effective, when the stars align it has been devastating. So, we’re reducing the size of the additional Pillars making it far harder to gain the advantage from overlapping damage. We’re also dramatically reducing the targeting area of Pillarstorm. Previously, Pillarstorm targeted every Battleborn in a radius around Orendi, making it an automatic hit on any enemy near her. Now, Pillarstorm will only trigger on enemies hit by Paradigm Shift, effectively constraining it to a thick, straight beam.

Reduced the size of the Pillars spawned by Level 10 Mutation Pillarstorm by 50%

Pillarstorm now only places Shadowfire Pillars under enemies in the area of Paradigm Shift

Gear

As usual, we’re making a few changes (Bola’s Target Finder, I’m looking at you!) and bug fixes to gear. As well, we’ve made a few sweeping changes that should alter the gear landscape in what we feel are interesting ways.

Legendary gear items have received a lot of feedback, and have often been hard to balance, especially as they were constrained to a fixed activation cost of 1800 shards. As activation cost is of our primary methods of balancing for gear strength, we found this restriction to be…restrictive. So, with this update, Legendary gear activation costs now scale with the random level of the gear. That means you will see some lower-powered Legendaries with lower costs, hopefully increasing the effectiveness of some previously overlooked gear items. Also, we now have the ability to adjust cost on a “per legendary” basis, so we’ll be using that as a tool going forward to help balance out Legendary Gear.

With that change, all Character Lore Legendary items are now iLvl 100, or „max roll“ legendaries. We found that only a handful of character legendaries were being used with any regularity, and would like more of them to feel valuable to players. This is part of the solution to achieving that.

Added Operation Specific Commander packs so players have more control over the legendaries they’re hunting for

Firmware Update 1.51C: Added a 15 second internal cooldown on the legendary effect

Interface

Made Command Rank, Profile Name, Earned Currency, Premium Currency, and Active Boosters visible while on the Main Menu

GAME MODES

Incursion

Simply put, our Incursion sentries have been pretty dumb, often neglecting to protect their assigned areas. So, we’ve upgraded them. Sentries will now be more vigilant at finding, tracking and damaging enemy targets, they will be less vulnerable to interruption, and they will re-evaluate their targeting priorities more frequently and from further away.

Along with this change, our big NPCs are getting a scaling health buff to keep them viable as the match progresses. Thralls and Super Minions have always been intended to be „tide turners“ in battle, and with this update, they should be more effective in that role.

Our attempt to improve the tie-breaking mechanic in matches did not yield the results we desired. Our goal was to provide more tangible ways for players to contribute to tie-breakers, especially in Incursion where ties between evenly-matched teams are fairly common. In doing so, we changed which stats appeared on the default screen of the scoreboard to coincide with the tie-breaking stats to help players understand which stats were important to track for securing a win.

After listening to discussion and re-evaluating our design, we determined that our changes weren’t achieving our goals. Some stats which were useful to players for gauging the heart of gameplay were hidden. Some stats were being used for tie-breaker evaluation that weren’t as important for the game mode. Some stats (like Damage Taken) were debatable about whether high stats or low stats were best. And we found some bugs in how some stats were being evaluated.

While we are sticking with the tie-breaker mechanic for now, we have re-evaluated the used and displayed stats for each game mode and are making changes on which stats are evaluated for tie-breaker victories.

Replaced Healing Givenstat with Shards

Replaced Buildables Builtstat with Objects Built

The seven in-game stats are displayed on the first page of stats in the Post-Match Statistics tab

Incursion: Replaced Sentry Killswith Objects Built on the scoreboard

Incursion: Replaced Damage Takenwith Minions Killed on the scoreboard

Incursion: Added Sentry Damageto post-match statistics

Meltdown: Replaced Damage Takenwith Objects Built on the scoreboard

Capture: Replaced Damage Takenwith Points Defended on the scoreboard

Face-Off: Replaced Damage Takenwith Varelsi Killed on the scoreboard

Maps

Paradise

Supply Stations are Tier 3 at the beginning of the match

Outskirts

Supply Stations are Tier 3 at the beginning of the match

Bots

Added Bot support for Pendles, Ernest, Kid Ultra, and Beatrix

Bots can now use all Marketplace Skins and Taunts

Quality of Life

Added a confirmation dialog box when selecting or banning a character

After selecting a character, the Loadout tab is displayed instead of the Skin tab

Single Boosts are no longer displayed under the Bundles tab in the Marketplace

Added a Blind Pick option to character select

Fixed an issue on PC that caused the Gear Bank to scroll when attempting to select an item by clicking on it.

Added a Taunt button prompt to character select

Character confirmation dialogs do not close when a teammate selects a character

Added screen message call-outs for specific game mode events

BUG FIXES

Characters

Stunned enemies can now be knocked back

Beatrix: Adjusted weight so that she reacts properly when hit with knockbacks